Under Water Tests Mimick Conditions of Future Missions

July 28, 2014 7:11 AM

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NASA’s Extreme Environment Missions Operations (NEEMO) 18 spend a lot of time 19 meters underwater. They are part of a test that attempts to simulate the conditions of a manned asteroid landing. The testing grounds are 5 kilometers from Key Largo.

“We’ll be testing out those tools if we did go to an asteroid,” says Jeanette Epps, one of the astronauts on the NEEMO 18 crew. The test is centered around a 10 minute communication delay, which simulates the delay of the crew being farther from the Earth than the Earth is from the sun. Each astrona...